What is Life?

Is there a definition of life? What defines life according to you. Is there such a fundamental defintion or is that name given arbitrarily to subjectively grouped characteristics? I found this article which may be interesting and talks about Schrodinger's What is Life?:

"In his 1943 lectures, Schrodinger posed the question 'What Is Life?' and remarked that the inability of chemistry and physics to account for such events is no reason at all for doubting that they could be accounted for by those sciences."

Re: What is Life?

I read Schrodinger's book and it was mostly to claim that quantum physics had nothing to do with life because quantum phenomenon had no impact on the macroscopic world. This was already dubious at the time for the simple fact that quantum events were affecting macroscopic events in the lab every time we made measurements of a quantum state. The nail in the coffin came with the advent of chaos science which discovered that by replacing nonlinear equations with linear approximations, science of the previous era was missing out on the fact that microscopic fluctuations are amplified to affect macroscopic events all the time.

Re: What is Life?

I read Schrodinger's book and it was mostly to claim that quantum physics had nothing to do with life because quantum phenomenon had no impact on the macroscopic world. This was already dubious at the time for the simple fact that quantum events were affecting macroscopic events in the lab every time we made measurements of a quantum state. The nail in the coffin came with the advent of chaos science which discovered that by replacing nonlinear equations with linear approximations, science of the previous era was missing out on the fact that microscopic fluctuations are amplified to affect macroscopic events all the time.

In other words, to expand on this...

Based on the behavior of linear equations Schrodinger concluded that quantum fluctuation had to average out to no effect on the large scale. But non-linear equations often don't do this. They can selectively amplify some quantum fluctuations while ignoring the rest, resulting in macroscopic outcomes which are ultimately unpredictable and in fact have ultimately no determining causes in the pre-existing conditions. This is the so called, "butterfly effect." In fact, when you thinking about it, this is exactly what equipment in a lab is doing when it measures a quantum state and on the basis of the results alters a visible display on the macroscopic level where we can see the result.

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